Today has been a good day. The house is clean, had friends round for lunch and my wife makes a mean cheese cake, London Irish are top of the premiership and my "puffer bottle" does indeed produce grass with a far better texture than scatter, and it took no time what so ever.

My test piece consisted of a 15cm by 15cm area of neat PVA on card, some Jarvis static grass and the said puffer bottle.

The biggest challenge was actually getting the bag of scatter into the bottle without covering the shed, but once achieved, I spent 30 seconds shaking it like a looney and then the bottle "huffed and puffed and after about 12 puffs the area was covered. I got the hover out to remove the unwanted scatter lying round the edges, and then simply used it to suck in various directions to both get scatter that had not been grabbed, and to create some texture.

Looking at my work proudly, and then casting my eye over the rest of the layout I am left with this feeling that I need to find a way to cover/change the flock that has been used, but i'll worry about that another time.

I still have to buy the ferns from scalelink yet though as looking at their website I did not trust their payment system so i'll give them a call on Monday instead. I'll make a few of them and stick them into the new grass to see what the effect is like.

Apart from today's 5 min job I had a good play with the branchline side of the layout just running a few short freight trains around.